


Guilt Isn't Always a Rational Thing

by doctormccoy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Commission fic, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Guilt, Happy Ending, Healing, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Self-Harm (Over Exercising), Trauma, time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 19:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2282163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctormccoy/pseuds/doctormccoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky isn't the only one who has nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guilt Isn't Always a Rational Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheDisreputableDog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDisreputableDog/gifts).



> “Guilt isn't always a rational thing… Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.” – Maureen Johnson, Girl At Sea
> 
> A commission fic delivery for enter21, who wanted Steve-centric angst and guilt, best friend!Natasha, healing, dancing, and a happy ending.
> 
> This is my first time writing anything Marvel whatsoever, so, I hope I didn't write anyone or anything too poorly.

The day Steve finds Bucky is the day he stops looking for him.

A trip to Russia with Sam had yielded nothing but dead ends and an ocean of frustration, and so, with an ache in his chest he couldn’t quite identify, he returned to his apartment in New York City.

He had refused Tony’s numerous offers to live at Stark Tower with some of the other former members of the Avengers, namely Clint, Natasha, and Maria Hill. Even Phil Coulson, the new Head of the healing Shield, visited from time to time, and Steve had yet to see him since his untimely “death” before the battle with Loki and his army. He just wasn’t able to muster up the courage to visit them yet, least of all Natasha. 

Steve couldn’t bear to see the pity in her face when she figured out he had come back empty handed once more.

Sam, bless him, had followed Steve to every corner of the world, chasing after rumors and ghosts. A phantom, dressed in black, who was always gone before they even arrived.

The former paratrooper had accepted Stark’s offer of a free luxury apartment, however, and so Steve had been alone when he entered his silent, sparsely furnished apartment, eyelids as heavy as his heart. He remembered wanting nothing more than to sleep for the next ten or twelve years, when he rounded the end of the hallway and came face to face with the ghost he had been chasing for months.

Bucky, the Winter Soldier, had been sprawled across his couch, skin waxy and hair matted beneath his head. He was asleep, and Steve couldn’t begin to fathom just how long he had been there, waiting for him to come home. 

How did Bucky even know where to find him? Stark covered the costs of the apartment, and Steve had rented it under a false name. 

But then, Bucky had always been resourceful, even before the rigorous Russian assassin slash spy training.

That had been many months ago, now, and looking back on it, Steve still wasn’t quite sure he believed it had really happened. After chasing his ghosts for so long, he turned around to discover they had found him first.

It had taken a week to persuade Bucky to come with him to Stark Tower, and another week after that before he’d let anyone but Steve touch him. 

He’d refused to let his hair be cut, and so Steve had taken painstaking care to wash and gently comb out every single knot that had formed from weeks of neglect. 

The dark pit of guilt in his stomach felt like a nest of vipers, sinking their poisoned teeth into his flesh with every single tug of the plastic tines through matted hair. 

It took a month before Bucky could be convinced that he needed to be examined by a doctor. His metal arm was carefully removed by Tony and scanned for any weapons or dangerous tech.

Three weeks after that, he is fitted with an updated model made by Tony himself, with even more bells and whistles than the previous one. 

Bucky seems to appreciate it, but lacks the will to vocalize his thanks to Stark.

He had not spoken to anyone, yet, not even Steve. 

They move into Stark Tower so there are more people to help with Bucky’s healing, and to keep an eye on him, should his mind reset itself back to the days of the Winter Soldier.

Sam seems reluctant, at first, to help watch Bucky when Steve needed a break from the silent stare across the room and the prickling of guilt that it always causes, but, surprisingly enough, Sam is the first one Bucky ends up speaking to. 

It’s nothing of particular gravity, or anything about Hydra. Just a simple, “I’m sorry I ripped your wing off,” when Sam sets the pizza he had just ordered down on the table in front of the former assassin. 

Steve is consumed with jealousy when Sam tells him this, before a fresh wave of guilt washes over him. Sam was trying to help him. He had no right to be angry at him just because he happened to be present for the first real sign of progress from Bucky in weeks.

After that, it’s like a dam had broken somewhere in Bucky’s mind, and he began to speak more and more to the people around him. 

Everyone that is, except Steve.

He would, of course, talk to him when the need arose for such interaction between them. Grunted responses that his twice weekly therapy sessions with a highly recommended (and thoroughly checked out) psychiatrist, who specialized in cases involving trauma, imprisonment, and torture, were going reasonably well.

Nods and shrugs at questions about what he wanted for dinner, and whether he had plans for the day.

Certainly nothing like the full conversations he would have with the other members of Stark’s odd household menagerie. 

He got on surprisingly well with Clint and Natasha these days. Steve supposed, more than any of them, they understood what it was like to be forcibly broken down and unmade, and then put back together again to fight for someone else’s vision of a better future. 

Steve put on a good face, despite the crippling weight of years of guilt wearing at him, but it was hard when Bucky wouldn’t even look at him unless he had to. 

A few weeks later, Bucky asked for his own apartment at Stark Tower, and moved out, leaving Steve with an empty home and an even emptier feeling in his chest.

It had been five months since Steve had found a half starved Bucky on his couch in Manhattan. Five months since a pit of raw self-hatred and despair opened up beneath his feet and swallowed him whole.

He had declined Pepper’s offer to find a psychiatrist for him to talk to about what had happened, insisting that he wasn’t the one that needed any help. He hadn’t been through what Bucky had survived. 

She’d given him a strange look, silent and assessing, before accepting his refusal. She couldn’t force him to get help, after all, and if Captain America said he was fine then she supposed she had to take his word on it.

But Steve wasn’t fine, not by a long shot.

It wasn’t that he was unhappy Bucky was getting better. He was weak in the knees with relief when the examinations showed Bucky was healing from the tortures and experiments used to wipe his memory, and yet, his former best friend showed no signs of remembering anything of the past. 

He had said, early on, that he would see glimpses, occasionally, of his life before the Winter Soldier. Snatches of red, white, and blue, and a group of men charging into battle. A grotesque, red face. A pretty dame with dark brown curls and red lipstick. 

If he remembered anything from their lives together before the war, however, he never mentioned it.

The long years where they shivered and starved together in their tiny apartment; growing up together, where all they had was one another. 

The spark that they had once shared and kept them warm through long winters in the city. 

And while the sinking realization that maybe Bucky might never remember who they once were to each other ate away at Steve like acid into flesh, Bucky seemed unperturbed by it. 

After all, he was making new memories with Natasha and Clint, and Bruce. Even Tony and Sam were starting to become friendlier with the former assassin, especially after one long night where Bucky had broken into Tony’s apartment and sobbed out his grief at remembering he was the one responsible for murdering his father and mother. 

Tony seemed to warm up to him after that.

Everything was going well for Bucky, and he was healing. His nightmares came with less frequency, and became easier for him to manage on his own. Last night, when Steve had burst into Bucky’s room, after Jarvis’ quiet voice made him aware that Bucky was having a nightmare, and Bucky was already calm and composed, it was like a punch to the chest.

Bucky didn’t need him anymore. Had he ever really needed him in the first place? Steve was always the one that had needed Bucky. He’d needed him to take care of him when he was too sick and frail before the war. If Bucky hadn’t been so absorbed with protecting him on that train and covering his back, then he wouldn’t have been knocked through the gaping hole in the side.

And if Steve had just been faster, been stronger, been _better_ , then he wouldn’t have fallen.

But Bucky wasn’t the only one who had nightmares. 

They would consume Steve almost nightly, and if he hadn’t ordered Jarvis to keep it secret, he was pretty sure all of Stark Tower would know of his weakness. 

He had no right to their pity, or their help, and he didn’t dare ask for it. Bucky already didn’t need him to take care of him, there was no reason to make it so he didn’t trust, too.

And so he suffered in silence, trying to drown the endless images of Bucky falling from the train, Bucky screaming as Stark reattached his nerves to the new prosthetic arm, Bucky coming at him with a knife and murder in his eyes, Bucky bleeding, Bucky suffering, Bucky dying.

He spent a lot of time in the gym, working out his frustrations on himself.

He would become stronger, and then he could protect Bucky. He could be trusted to keep him safe.

If he was aware that his absence and growing melancholy had been noticed by the rest of the group, he didn’t acknowledge it. He had no time for their pity, nor did he deserve it.

Fifty pushups. 

It was his fault that Bucky had suffered so much.

A hundred lunges.

He wouldn’t be surprised if they all blamed him. 

Two hundred crunches. 

Bucky sure did.

Steve’s arms gave out and he fell from the pull bar, collapsing in a shivering heap on the mat beneath it. Even with the super soldier serum in his body, there was only so much his muscles could take before they needed to rest, and Steve hadn’t been much of that lately. 

He was shaking and drenched with sweat, and the clock on the wall let him know that he had been down here for almost six hours. He was dehydrated and his body desperately needed calories after such a brutal workout. 

How many pullups had he done, distracted and lost in the past several months?

Steve doesn’t quite remember passing out, and he definitely can’t recall how he made it back to his room. He wakes up in his bed, clean and dressed in his pajamas. 

He struggles to process what happened when a pair of angry, red eyebrows come into his field of vision, and he realizes he’s in deep shit.

“What do you think you’re playing at, Rogers?” Natasha grouses, handing him a bottle of water that he gratefully downs in a few, greedy gulps. He pretends not to have heard her question, instead choosing to roll out of bed and wince as his sore muscles protest the movement. How long had he been asleep? 

For that matter, why was Natasha even here in the first place?

“Where’s Bucky?” he asks in a low growl, his voice hoarse with dehydration and exhaustion.

She stares at him for a long, heavy moment and stands up to leave the room, forcing him to follow if he wants an answer to his question.

“He’s with Pepper and Clint. His psychiatrist wanted to start reintroducing him to aspects of normal life, and so they went to see a movie together. Some romantic comedy that’s been out for a few weeks, so the theater will be mostly empty,” she says finally, sitting on his armchair and crossing one leg over the other. 

Steve knows when he’s being studied and he heaves a sigh, predicting the interrogation that is to come. 

“Why are you here, Natasha?” he asks, figuring there was no point in beating around the bush.

She seems vaguely surprised, and impressed, that he had the balls to meet this head on, and folds her hands neatly on her lap, her tone neutral when she speaks.

“You need help, Rogers.”

Steve eyeballs her like she was speaking gibberish all of a sudden, eyebrows knitted and mouth set in a grim line.

“I’m fine, Natasha. I’m not the one had to go through years of torture and abuse,” he says flatly, and if looks could kill he would be a smoldering pile of ash at the withering glare he gets in return.

“Yeah, you’re fine.”

She stands up and corners him against the couch, pinning him down with her eyes and words alone. He’s pretty sure he has a hundred pounds on her at the very least, but at that moment, Steve isn’t convinced he’d be able to take her. 

“You’re so fine you’re practically living in your bedroom. So perfectly, damned fine that you won’t talk to any of us unless we force communication on you. So beautifully, amazing, wonderfully _fine_ that you spend every night in the gym, working yourself to the point of exhaustion, before you come back to your place and not sleep,” she hisses, and Steve can’t remember the last time he heard her sound so angry.

“I.. When you put it that way..” he trails off lamely, and the voice in the corner of his mind that sounds painfully like Bucky starts to snarl about how he was worthless, how he had no right to need her help after what Steve had put him through.

His back straightens and he stares back at her, hard, arms folding stubbornly across his chest.

“It’s none of your business, Natasha. Why aren’t you at that movie? I thought you and Bucky were best friends, now.”

Guilt slaps in the face a lot harder than Natasha does, and he sits there, stunned, feeling the heat from his bruised flesh beneath his fingers. 

He probably deserved that. 

“No one was stopping you from joining us. Pepper asked you last night if you wanted to go with them, and you told her no. No one has ever stopped you from spending time with us, and especially not with him.”

Steve stares at her, open mouthed, and shakes his head. 

“Bucky doesn’t want to be near me. I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.”

Steve didn’t deserve to be near Bucky. 

Natasha looks like she could actually kill him this time, and actually seems to contemplate it for a long second before she shakes her head, sighing.

“You need help, Steve. Sometimes, when we see the person we care for the most suffering, it hurts us, too. In ways we can’t even comprehend. Maybe you should try talking to Sam. Wasn’t that sort of his thing, helping soldiers understand their grief and trauma, back before he dove head first into helping Captain America save the world?”

Steve sits there, dumbfounded and speechless, and Natasha takes that as her hint to leave and let him think it over. Before she closes the door to his apartment, though, she turns back to look at him, expression pensive.

“James was the one who asked Pepper to invite you to the movie. Seemed to believe you would say no if he asked you himself.”

And with that parting blow, she’s gone, leaving Steve thinking that a tornado had just blown through everything he’d come to know about the past several months. He doesn’t know what to do, so he does the first thing that comes to mind.

He goes to find Sam.

When his friend opens the door to see Steve standing there, looking uncomfortable and on the verge of breaking down, he smiles in relief and stands back to let him in.

And it helps.

It doesn’t fix everything, not all at once. Not really at all, for a while. 

There are many days where Steve can’t bring himself to admit the darkness chasing at the corners of his mind to Sam, and on those days he finds himself seated in the exact chair Bucky does, speaking to the very same psychiatrist. 

It’s easier to speak to a stranger – he doesn’t have to fear her judgment – and he pours out every single angry, vile thought that had weighed him down for so long. The guilt and the self-loathing pour out of him, and when it’s finally done, and he’s out of words, he feels.. empty.

Not the kind of soul crushing emptiness he had felt after watching Bucky fall from the train, but a sort of.. blankness. Like a slate wiped clean, ready to start fresh once more. 

After a few weeks of intense therapy, and a few lunches with Sam, where he talks about why he had ended up at Shield, and his struggles to adapt to life as a civilian after living so long as a soldier, Steve starts to slowly reintroduce himself to the rest of the group again. 

He joins them for outings to the Chinese buffet down the street, and lets Natasha drag him out to go shopping with her and Pepper. He stops turning down invitations to go over Clint’s for movie nights.

The nightmares are still there, but they’re less frequent. 

He’s learning how to breathe again, one breath at a time. 

But there’s still the matter of Bucky, who has yet to approach him and avoids his gaze, falling into silence when Steve is in the room. He can see Natasha silently prodding him to speak with his former friend, and every time he chickens out, slinking away to lick his wounds like the coward he was.

After being consumed with guilt and blaming himself for Bucky’s pain for so long, it was hard to remind himself of his therapist’s insistence that he wasn’t at fault. That it was Bucky’s choice to protect him on that train, and that only Hydra and Zola were to blame for the tortures he had endured. 

He couldn’t shake the lingering belief that Bucky must blame him, even if no one else did. Steve certainly wouldn’t hold it against him.

His answer to that burning question would come to him as abruptly as Bucky himself had come back into Steve’s life. 

Stark was hosting a masked costume party, in celebration of Pepper’s birthday, and Steve had been expressly informed he had no choice but to attend or else Natasha would murder him.

Once Clint made it clear everyone would tell the police that Steve had died of old age in his sleep and that he had no backup, he supposed he really should come, at least for a little while.

Besides, he thought, looking around at the elegantly dressed party goers, this wasn’t all that bad. It was definitely Pepper’s doing, though – Steve didn’t think it was Tony’s style in the slightest. 

Everyone was wearing elaborate masks and he couldn’t tell who anyone was unless they spoke to him. He could float through the party, another anonymous masked man in a suit, and just enjoy the food and the atmosphere. Though, the fact that his mask was an intricately designed Eagle, complete with a curved beak over his nose, probably gave him away to some of the guests. He hadn’t seen any of the other Avengers, and figured they were all mingled in with the other party goers, enjoying the chance to be just another person like Steve was.

He was content to spend the evening taking in the soft hum of conversation, mixing with the gentle lull of music coming from the musicians Tony, or rather Pepper, had hired, seated at the edge of the room. Knowing Tony, he’d tried to get her to allow him to invite AC/DC or some other hard rock band that Steve heard blaring from his work room most days. Steve was pretty sure Pepper was the only one capable of reigning in Tony’s eccentricities, for which he was definitely appreciative. He was full of nice food and, even though the serum wouldn’t let him get drunk, he had a warm, comfortable sort of buzz on the edges of his mind, making him feel relaxed and at ease.

His reverie is interrupted by a hand on his shoulder, turning to see a man with short cropped dark hair, wearing an ornate mask shaped like a bear, standing beside him. His suit is crisp and expensive looking, and the mask covers so much of his face Steve can’t get a good look at who might be beneath it. The dark lighting in the ball room throws shadows over what the mask doesn’t cover, and Steve supposed that was kind of the point of them. Anonymity, and all that.

“Can I help you?” he asks, staring uncertainly at the oddly quiet man beside him, eyes gleaming from behind the bear mask in a way Steve swears is familiar.

He’s still trying to place them by the time the stranger has led him out onto the dance floor, placing one hand on his shoulder and the other at his hip, head cocking in silent invitation. 

Dancing with another man had never really been high on Steve’s lifelong “to do” list. He had known since long before the war came that he was interested in men just as much as he was in women, but, back in those days that kind of thing could get you killed. Any lingering attraction he felt for one man in particular was forcibly buried under years of repression and societally institutionalized homophobia. 

Sam said things were very different these days, and that people like Steve weren’t so abnormal. It was strange to hear, after a lifetime of accepting he would never get explore this part of himself, that it was almost commonplace these days. Not the illegal taboo he had been raised with.

He hesitated, only briefly, before remembering that he was in a mask, and no one would know who he was. The masked stranger probably had no clue he had asked Captain America for a dance, but rather, had just sought out someone that seemed attractive enough to be worth flirting with. 

Bucky’s face flashes before his eyes and he swallows, giving the other man a nod. It would do him no good to think about his first love, not here. Not when Bucky clearly didn’t wish to be near him.

The next song starts with a soft trill, but Steve hardly hears it as he and the stranger start to sway with it, moving through other dancing couples around the floor in silence. The eyes of the other man look as distant as Steve felt, and he lets them close briefly, allowing himself one single moment to believe that this was 1941 and he was with Bucky in their small apartment, being taught how to dance so he didn’t embarrass Bucky in front of the ladies the next time they went out. 

In the brief moments his eyes fall shut, the stranger seizes his chance to lean in and press his mouth to Steve’s, and Steve feels as if the entire world has stopped turning on its axis.

The lips on his are dry and slightly parted, and his eyes fly open to stare incredulously at the other man. 

He sees Bucky face again, and pushes the unknown party goer away, feeling flush and hot all over.

“I’m.. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

He flees like a coward, unable to face whatever judging expression he was sure the other man would be wearing. 

Steve makes it out of the ballroom and several rooms over before the stranger catches up.

Except he isn’t a stranger any longer.

The mask has been removed and a painfully familiar face is staring at him – one that haunted his nightmares for years.

“Am I dreaming?” he asks out loud, taking in the smooth shaved face and short, neatly cropped hair of the man opposite him. This Bucky he barely knew, the Bucky that had been rabidly insistent that his hair remain long, and refused to have his face shaved bare, now looked like the Bucky he remembered.

Except now it looked..

Well, it looked wrong.

Because this Bucky wasn’t the Bucky of 1941. But he also wasn’t the Winter Soldier, either. He was some combination of the two. A Bucky that Steve hadn’t taken the time to get to know.

“I hope not, because it took Natasha an hour to get my hair right and I would hate to have wasted her time,” Bucky said from opposite him, a wry half smile on his face that’s so familiar it punches a hole in Steve’s gut.

Bucky had spoken to him. Not just a grunted response to a question, or a shrug, but an actual sentence. 

Steve’s stunned to silence for a long moment, staring at the other man, who stands there awkwardly shifting from foot to foot, the bear mask held in his hand.

“Do you like it?”

The question is far from anything Steve might have expected, and it prompts him to take a step forward, towards Bucky, letting his eyes linger on pink lips that had, just a moment before, been pressed against his own.

“Did you… Did you do this for me, Buck?” he murmured, trying to categorize how he felt about that. 

Bucky shrugged and fingered at the sequins sewn into the bear mask, suddenly too shy to meet Steve’s gaze.

“I hoped it might make you look at me.”

And if that doesn’t make Steve Rogers feel like a total heel, what Bucky says next certainly does.

“Ever since I.. came back, you’ve looked at me like I’m the monster lurking under your bed. Like the sight of me made you sick. So I figured, maybe, if I looked less like the monster, and more like.. the me you remember, then you wouldn’t treat me different anymore.”

Steve closes the gap between the before he even realizes it, and his hands are framing Bucky’s face, eyebrows drawn together as the guilt crashes down on him like a tidal wave.

He didn’t realize that his own self-loathing and pity could hurt someone else, least of all Bucky, and while Natasha had hinted that there was more to Bucky’s avoidance than he was aware of, he’d been too much of an idiot to try and seek out the truth. And Bucky had paid the price. 

A faint smile graces his lips and he runs his fingers through the prickles of Bucky’s new haircut, unable to help the wave of nostalgia washing over him.

But..

“Did you prefer your hair longer?” he asks quietly, and his hands make sure Bucky can’t look away and attempt to lie. If Steve can’t run away from this, then, neither can he. There couldn’t be any more running.

Bucky shrugs and Steve takes that as a ‘Yes’ he was too nervous to say out loud, and sighs softly, pulling the other man to him and resting his chin on top of his head.

“Then.. That’s the way I like it, too.”

He’s surprised to find that this is the complete, and honest truth. 

A few months ago, Steve Rogers would have paid a small fortune to see Bucky as he was now, dressed in a nice suit, face smooth and hair neat and tidy. But he wasn’t that Bucky anymore, and Steve wasn’t that Steve Rogers, either.

They had both changed a lot in the last few months.

“I’m sorry, Bucky. For everything. For.. not being there to help you get better, and letting myself get lost in my own guilt at seeing how much you had suffered,” he whispered into his hair, closing his eyes when the other man slips his arms around Steve’s waist. 

“You have a lot of catching up to do, Steve,” comes Bucky’s reply, somewhere around his collarbone, and Steve can’t help but huff out a soft laugh. 

“I don’t doubt that you’ll put me through my paces.”

He can feel the other man’s smile through his shirt, and slides his fingers through Bucky’s short hair, rubbing absently at his scalp as they stand there, entwined, for who knows how long.

And they talk. More than they’ve talked since Bucky fell from the train in 1944. Steve learns that Bucky has remembered a lot more of their early life together than he ever assumed, and allows himself bask in the glow of happiness that gives him. Bucky admits that he was the one who found Steve collapsed in the gym and called Natasha, and that he had been avoiding Steve the entire time because he thought Steve wanted space. That he believed Steve blamed him for the things he had done for Hydra, and hated him for it.

It made Steve want to throw up, that Bucky had thought these things the entire time, and when the first desperate word of apology falls from his lips it’s like a river he can’t dam up, the true reasons for why he had acted the way he had pouring from him in a waterfall of guilt and self-loathing. At some point he began to cry, and Bucky held him, and soothed him, accepting his pleading apologies. 

When his words start to become incoherent and stricken with pain, Bucky shuts him up with another hard kiss. It tastes salty with Steve’s tears, but he relishes the contact, starved for it these past few months with no one to blame but himself. Bucky doesn’t blame him. Bucky doesn’t hate him. Bucky loves him, like he always has, and it’s more than Steve could have ever hoped for.

Steve loses track of time when he’s with Bucky. He doesn’t know how long they stand there kissing, hands seeking out familiar places they’d never dared to touch before now.

Eventually Bucky peels himself from Steve’s embrace and ties the bear mask back onto his face, giving Steve a wary, anxious look despite what they had just shared, like he’s uncertain if Steve will follow. He holds his hand out, the prosthetic one that Tony had designed to look almost indistinguishable from real skin, and Steve takes it without a second thought, the warm smile on his kiss bruised lips feeling strange after so many months of stony silence.

The guilt was still there, and Steve didn’t think it would ever really disappear entirely. There would always be some small part of him that blamed himself for the things that Bucky had suffered. And Bucky was far from being perfectly healed himself. He still had nightmares, and had his own guilty demons to fight off. 

But Steve had a feeling they would both have an easier time of it, now. They had always worked best as a pair, after all. 

He follows his best friend back towards the party, still smiling, squeezing the hand in his own as they make their way onto the dance floor once more. 

“Do you think we can make this work?” Steve asks quietly, slipping an arm around Bucky’s waist, hands still clasped together.

Bucky shrugs and begins to sway to the music, the faint lilt of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

“All we can do is try, but, if you’re willing to try with me, then I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

When Steve kisses him again all he tastes is Bucky, and that’s just fine with him.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry that Thor doesn't make an appearance, but, he's still off with Jane at the moment enjoying a well deserved break.
> 
> I might write another chapter to this, with the entire story from Bucky's POV. We'll see.


End file.
